- Pioneering Hardware-Accelerated ZFS to Improve Throughput, Efficiency, and Scalability in HPC Storage
MaxLinear, Inc. (NASDAQ: MXL), a leading provider of high-performance storage accelerator SoCs, and Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) today announced a collaboration to enable hardware-accelerated OpenZFS File System storage for large scale, high-performance computing (HPC) environments.
Los Alamos National Laboratory and MaxLinear have jointly developed a hardware-accelerated OpenZFS storage architecture designed to improve performance and storage capacity for next-generation NVMe flash-based storage infrastructure.
“Los Alamos’ Direct I/O support and Z.I.A. (ZFS Interface for Accelerators) work were developed to accelerate performance for the ZFS-using community,” said Gary Grider, Senior Director for Computing Technologies at the Laboratory. “In this collaboration, MaxLinear demonstrated hardware-offloaded ZFS operations with reported speedups of approximately 39x for writes and 7x for reads. These results illustrate the potential for accelerator-based approaches to reduce host CPU involvement while maintaining the data-protection benefits associated with ZFS.”
“Los Alamos National Laboratory has been at the forefront of advancing storage architectures for high-performance computing,” said Vikas Choudhary, Executive Vice President of Connectivity & Storage at MaxLinear. “By enabling hardware-accelerated ZFS with Panther™ Storage Accelerators, we deliver deep data compression, data protection services, and multi-hundred gigabit scalability—while preserving the data integrity guarantees that ZFS is known for.”
LANL has decades of experience in operating ZFS at scale and has led to the development of key filesystem extensions, including Direct I/O support and ZIA (ZFS Interface for Accelerators)—a structured framework for introducing hardware acceleration into the ZFS data path without modifying core filesystem semantics.
MaxLinear contributes the Panther™ family of Storage Accelerator SoCs and Storage Software Development Kits, providing high throughput, low latency execution of ZFS data path services using a domain-specific high-performance SoC architecture. Panther™ provides deep data compression, encryption, deduplication, and data protection services executed inline in hardware, delivering high throughput and low latency while significantly reducing host CPU overhead.
Through this collaboration, Panther is integrated with ZFS as a Data Processing Unit Services Module (DPUSM) provider, enabling inline hardware acceleration of selected CPU‑intensive operations such as data compression and checksum generation to increase storage capacity, improve file I/O performance, and reduce host CPU utilization. This combined hardware‑software approach preserves ZFS ordering, consistency, and data integrity guarantees while enabling efficient compute offload and scalable acceleration.
This collaboration integrates LANL’s advancement in Direct I/O and ZIA framework with MaxLinear’s Panther™ Storage Accelerator.
Key capabilities include:
- Hardware-assisted ZFS services enabling deep data compression: offload compression reduces host CPU involvement on high throughput I/O paths, enabling high I/O performance with minimal impact on CPU utilization.
- Scalable accelerator integration: Multiple Panther™ Storage Accelerators can be deployed in parallel through ZIA, enabling scalable performance without introducing serialization or centralized bottlenecks.
- High bandwidth operation: Achieved for the first time 57 GB/s read, and 47 GB/s write with GZIP L9 at ~1.3:1 compression, representative of high-entropy scientific data. Achieving this compression requires compute intensive algorithms like GZIP. Without Panther™, ZFS is limited to ~1.2 GB/s writes and 8.1 GB/s reads—delivering ~39x write and ~7x read speedup via hardware offload. Scales further with additional accelerators.
About MaxLinear, Inc.
MaxLinear, Inc. (Nasdaq: MXL) is a leading provider of radio frequency (RF), analog, digital, and mixed-signal integrated circuits for access and connectivity, wired and wireless infrastructure, and industrial and multimarket applications. MaxLinear is headquartered in Carlsbad, California. For more information, please visit https://www.maxlinear.com/.
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About Los Alamos National Laboratory
Los Alamos National Laboratory is a federally funded research and development center with priorities set by the Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration (DOE NNSA) and key national strategy guidance. We execute work across all of DOE’s missions: national security, science, energy, and environmental management. Scientific and engineering capabilities developed through LANL’s stockpile research are part of what makes DOE and NNSA a science, technology, and engineering powerhouse for the nation.
